The play is set between 1989 and 1991, the last two years of the life of Gladys Green, an 85 year old woman who runs a small art gallery in New York's Greenwich Village. She lives on her own near the gallery, but she is watched over by an adoring grandson (Daniel) who lives in the same building, and by a doting daughter (Ellen) and son-in-law (Howard), who live uptown from her. Gladys can’t hear very well and she has diabetes, but otherwise she is doing well enough. From this point we watch Gladys gradually lose some of her mental capabilities, mostly memory. Our attention is directed to how the family responds and comes to grips with her deterioration. Aware of Gladys’ past before she opened her gallery as an activist lawyer with a frenetic lifestyle, Daniel lays out a strategy the family adopts: “she’s got to have something to do.” Their chief tactic is to keep Gladys in the gallery where she could mix with people, keying off what she said keeps her sane: “Everyone needs someone to talk to, otherwise you’d just go nutty. I love to talk to people.” This approach works for a while, and mainly through permitting a young artist (Don), who has never before sold a painting, to exhibit his work in the gallery. Don keeps Gladys company and talks to her. He thinks he notices her hearing problem worsening, but Howard tells him, "I’m afraid that’s more her memory than her hearing aid.” What speeds up her deterioration, however, is the gallery losing its lease when the owner of the space decides to turn it into a cafe. A path ensues that is familiar to many people who have been close to a person losing memory and other mental functions with age. The family desperately wants to keep Gladys as independent as possible, but they need more help as time passes. She can stay in her own apartment for awhile with visiting nurses and aides, but eventually she needs to move in with Ellen and Howard; they never liked the idea of putting her in a nursing home, and they never did. In an aside directed at the audience, Daniel describes what his mother did for Gladys thereafter: she “took care of her, dressed her and cleaned her up and fed her and watched her fall apart, day in and day out with nothing to stop it and no relief in sight.” It did end, though, two months later when Gladys died in Ellen’s home.

Free-spirited six-year-old Moonee and her young mother Halley live in a motel on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida. In contrast to the families vacationing at nearby Walt Disney World, Moonee occupies her summer days by helping her mother hawk bootlegged goods to unsuspecting tourists and making trouble with other motel-dwelling children. With a ragtag and often burnt-out cast of characters, The Florida Project portrays the challenges of American poverty, the frustrations of familial (ir)responsibility, and the limits of a child’s ability to make the best of broken circumstances.

A coming-of-age tale told in the parlance
of Generation Z, Eighth Grade depicts the last week of Kayla Day’s
middle school career. The path has not been easy: Kayla struggles with social
anxiety and doesn’t have many friends. She’s voted “most quiet” by her class,
but despite her outward reality, Kayla contends on her personal YouTube channel
that, in fact, she is humorous and cool and talkative, if only her classmates
took the time to get to know her. Her assertions are put to the test in the
following week, during which Kayla goes to a pool party hosted by Kennedy
Graves (voted “best eyes”), attempts to kindle a spark with her crush, and
attends a high school shadowing program. These experiences challenge Kayla to
embody the advice she so readily espouses on her YouTube channel, and though
she isn’t miraculously transformed into the most popular girl at school in time
for graduation, she learns something of being herself.

Lily O’Connor is 30 something and working at a seaside arcade in northeastern England. She inherits some money from her mother’s small estate and wants to give her brother Michael his share. But, Lily lost track of Michael during their childhood after they were placed in separate new homes to protect them from the severe abuse their mother was inflicting on them. Michael has become a ne’er-do-well in adulthood, and so Lily’s search for him takes her through the dark alleys of London and puts her in the company of its dodgier inhabitants.

A bigger challenge to Lily in her search and in her life more generally is her epilepsy. How she experiences epilepsy forms the more interesting and dramatic elements of the story. We see Lily have several seizures in a variety of scenarios: before a date, on the subway, at a friend’s house, in a hotel room, and in a nightclub. We see how Lily senses them coming on as she says to herself:

Here’s the breath, here’s the breeze, here’s the shimmer…and I’m falling down the rabbit hole.

We see the ground in front of her becoming fuzzy but closer, then what looks to be her hand reaching out in front of her to lay a sweater down on the ground where she thinks she will land, and then the ground getting fuzzier still as she hits it. From the ground, we see that she can still make out some people bending down to help and others averting their gazes. As Lily loses all focus, hallucinations start, and we see her body floating among patterns of electrical bursts as she experiences them. Next we hear her scream before all goes dark and violent shaking starts. As she regains consciousness, we see what she sees, blurry at first and then as her surroundings come into focus. It may be the inside of an ambulance, a hospital room, or her apartment, where in anticipation of that possibility, she has painted on her walls: Don’t Worry Lily Home Bed Sleep SAFE NOW

As Lily goes into recovery after a seizure, the director takes us from Lily’s point of view to the point of view of bystanders. We see that as a result of these seizures, Lily often sustains bone fractures, lacerations, abrasions, puncture wounds, and bruises among other injuries. She goes about cleaning herself up in a manner that suggests a routine, something she expects. Nevertheless, the loss of time frustrates her.

I just lost 2 days. Chop it up. Chop it out of my life. All the outtakes. What would they look like if you put them all together.

Lily’s adaptation to her seizures and their consequences vexes the physicians she consults, which she does only when her medications are stolen and she needs new prescriptions, and when she is taken to the hospital after particularly bad seizures. These physicians want to get Lily onto newer and presumably better medications. She resists, saying to one of them,

All I want is my old meds back.You know when my scripts change, it messes with my head every time. If you wanna know why I’ve stayed on the old meds, it’s ‘cause I know who I am…You have no idea how new drugs change me, they make me feel like a ghost. Words fall out of my mouth like vomit. My brain, a lump of cold meat. Nah, I’m not doing it.

She decides to forgo all medications if she must move to a new regimen, but it doesn’t go well. Eventually she capitulates, adapts to new medications, and goes on with her life, or as she says, “Thrash, get up, get on with it.”

Kumail Nanjiani is
a Pakistani-born American living and working in Chicago. In addition to driving
for the ride-sharing company Uber, Kumail performs as a stand-up comic at a
local club, hoping to be noticed and land a big break. During one of his
shows, he meets a graduate student named Emily Gardner, and the two quickly
develop an intimate relationship.

Kumail hides his
relationship from his family, because they insist that he only date Pakistani
women. Privately, Kumail struggles not only with the cultural expectation of
intra-ethnic marriage, but also with other aspects of his heritage, such as
devotion to Islamic religious law. He chooses to maintain appearances out of
love for his family and fear of disownment. Emily eventually discovers Kumail’s
double life and in anger, ends their relationship.

Kumail and Emily’s
estrangement is interrupted when Emily is hospitalized with a mysterious
illness. Emily initially resists Kumail’s presence, but her sickness worsens
and she is placed in a medically-induced coma. Under these increasingly
uncertain circumstances, Kumail partners with Beth and Terry—Emily’s parents—to
navigate a confusing medical system and chart the best course of care for Emily.
The three of them clash over their differing perspectives on care and their
interpersonal relationships. As he waits with bated breath for Emily’s
recovery, Kumail is forced to confront his values and decide whether his desire
to please his family and his ongoing affection for Emily can coexist
harmoniously.

The world is a big place – 7.4 billion people
and counting. As much as we all enjoy the game of finding our doppelganger in a
crowd, there probably isn’t anyone in the world who is exactly like us. With a
genetic code of over 3 billion base pairs, of which there are innumerable
permutations, we would be hard pressed to find a clone of ourselves even if the
world had 7 trillion people. The exception is if you were born with an
identical sibling. But then again, you would know if you had a twin. Wouldn’t
you?The documentary Three Identical Strangers tells the unbelievable story of Bobby
Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman – three identical triplets who were
separated at birth and serendipitously reunited at the age of 19. The film
takes us through the circumstances of their reunion, highlighting the brothers’
instant rapport over their similarities and the ensuing fame resulting from the
public fascination with their extraordinary story. It began as a
euphoria-filled saga complete with talk show interviews, movie cameos, and even
a successful restaurant which they called “Triplets”.

The honeymoon phase ended in horrific fashion
once the parents of the respective siblings began asking questions as to why
the brothers were separated in the first place. A journalist who had been
investigating the triplets’ adoption agency, Louise Wise Services, helped to
uncover the details of an elaborate study performed by a child psychiatrist
named Dr. Peter Neubauer. In this study, each brother was placed into a home
which had another adoptive sister, and specifically assigned to a family of
lower, middle, and upper-class backgrounds. While the exact details of the
study objective remain unknown, it appears that the study was trying to determine
whether psychiatric illness was correlated more strongly with genetics or with
developmental environment; this is referred to colloquially as a “nature vs.
nurture” experiment.

The implications were earth-shattering. The brothers
struggled to cope with the realization that they had been marionettes in some
sort of sick experiment, with Dr. Neubauer pulling the strings the whole time.
Even worse was the fact that there were possibly several more identical
siblings with the same story who were deprived of their biological soul mate,
all at the behest of Neubauer and his associates. In fact, other sets of
identical siblings were eventually made aware of the experiment, and did have
the chance to meet, albeit many years after their birth.

The triplets also learned that their biological
mother had serious psychiatric problems – hence their inclusion in the study.
All three brothers had behavioral difficulties as adolescents, and it was distressing
to consider whether their issues may have been exacerbated by the separation
anxiety they experienced upon being separated at birth. In particular, Eddy
suffered from worsening episodes of bipolar disorder throughout his life. In
1995, at the age of 33, he committed suicide. He is notably absent for the
duration of the documentary, with Bobby and David narrating much of the film. Today,
they are still trying to uncover the particulars of Dr. Neubauer’s study, but
the research records remain under seal at Yale University until 2066. They may
never know the full extent of what was done to them and why.

Andrew Solomon’s 2012 book Far From the Treeis a study of families with children who are different in all sorts of ways from their parents and siblings to degrees that altered and even threatened family functions and relationships. Years after its publication, director Rachel Dretzin collaborated with Solomon to produce this documentary based on his book. At the time of filming, the children were already adults or were well into their teens. The film looks at how the families came to accept these children and how they sought—with varying success—happiness.

The documentary focuses on five family scenarios: homosexuality (Solomon’s own story); Down syndrome; dwarfism; murder; and autism. Anyone in these families or anyone who knew these families would never invoke the familiar idiom “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” when talking about these children. These apples fell far from the tree, and Solomon builds on that twist to the idiom to characterize the relationship between the affected children and their families as “horizontal.” By extension, Solomon characterizes the relationship of children who are not different from their parents and siblings in any appreciable manner as “vertical.” Only one of the original characters from the book appears in the documentary; the other families are newly “cast.” The film captures the lives of these families with all their challenges and successes, and intercuts footage from home videos the families provided. Dretzin also filmed interviews with parents and in some cases their children. The footage and interviews show how families evolved in their acceptance of their children and their situations as best they could. The best was still heartbreak for some, but real happiness was achieved for others.

This is an opera based on Elyn R. Saks’s best-selling book The Center Cannot Hold. Subtitled “My
Journey Through Madness,” the memoir recounts the author’s struggle with
schizophrenia. Here, Saks has
collaborated with composer/psychiatrist Kenneth B. Wells on the opera’s
libretto.

The librettists utilize the device of having three different
singers portray Elyn. One manifestation,
the “Lady of the Charts,” represents her when psychotic. The others are Elyn as a law student and the
present day Professor Saks as a law professor.
Another dramatic device involves the use of a chorus to embody the
protagonist’s schizophrenic delusions.
At the height of her paranoia, as Elyn sings Beethoven’s 5th
Symphony in an effort to keep herself together, the chorus recalls the
Symphony’s opening notes by singing “Elyn must die.”

The opera opens with Elyn as Professor Saks reflecting on
her childhood. Even then there were signs of the illness that, to quote a
famous poem by William Butler Yeats, ensures “the center cannot hold” in Elyn’s
life. During the first act, Elyn, a Yale law student, becomes psychotic in
front of her friends and is hospitalized. In a Connecticut hospital she is put
in restraints and treated by various mental health professionals. She imagines
she hears demons threatening to kill her. Elyn’s diagnosis and condition overwhelm her
parents, who have been called by the hospital.

In the second act, Elyn works to reintegrate her fragmented
mind. She is determined to get back to
law school. She is released from the
hospital. She finds an antipsychotic medication, with fewer side effects, that
she can live with. She resolves to devote her career to mental health law. At the conclusion of the opera, Elyn
anticipates graduation. She has been instrumental
in winning a class action suit against the use of restraints in psychiatric
patients. Her parents, friends and
doctors proclaim their pride in her accomplishments.

The film enters late into the lives of Anne and Georges, a Parisian couple apparently in their 80s, apparently long married, and apparently retired music teachers. Maybe they still teach music, and maybe they still play, based on the important place a grand piano is given in the grand living room of their apartment. Their daughter, Eva, is a working musician and is married to one as well. When Georges and Anne sit together in the living room, the controls to the stereo system are never more than an arm’s length away. This family is serious about music; they love music. But, their love of music is not the love of the movie title, “Amour.” Amour is the love between Anne and Georges, and the forms this love takes.

We first see the amour of Georges and Anne in their quotidian activities. They eat breakfast together at the small table in the cramped kitchen. They sit across from one another—or one of them lies down on the adjacent couch—and read to each other from the paper or talk about various subjects, like music. They have been doing this for decades, and probably would for decades more, but that isn’t likely, and we see why soon.

While having their breakfast one morning, Anne becomes unresponsive to Georges while looking him straight in the eye. She eventually comes to and goes about her business as if nothing happened and doesn’t know what Georges is talking about when he describes the incident. She probably had a transient ischemic attack—a warning that a stroke may be coming—and as a result, had surgery to clear an occlusion from her carotid artery to prevent a stroke from actually occurring. However, something goes wrong in the hospital and Anne suffers a stroke there nevertheless. She returns home with some paralysis on her right side. The form of amour changes. Now the quotidian activities involve Georges administering care to Anne: he sees to her toilet, washes her hair, cuts her food, reads her newspaper articles, and helps her walk from one spot to another in the apartment when he’s not pushing her in a wheelchair. During a moment when Georges and Anne are in their customary chairs in the living room, Georges says to her, “I’m so pleased to have you back.” To which Anne responds, “Please never take me back to the hospital, promise?” But when Anne has another stroke, Georges takes her back to the hospital. She returns home having lost most of her ability to move at all, she can only eat or drink with considerable difficulty even with assistance, she can’t communicate verbally to any extent, and she wets herself. Georges adds feeding her and exercising her arms and legs to his established routines of bathing her, reading to her, and telling her stories. Amour has taken the shape of getting her through the days with great effort and later with help from nurses. Anne wants no more of her life despite Georges’ efforts and pleas. His daughter argues with him about the care her mother needs. The nurses can’t administer care to Anne in a way he expects. Anne does not want her daughter to see her as she is. She cries out for her own mother. She won’t take water or food. She is in pain. Georges is left with only options that test the extreme boundaries of amour.

Anyone walking
through a theater district over the past several decades and even centuries ago
would likely run into a mad king—Lear, Richard III, George III, Scar. As of
2015, there’s a new mad king to be found in theater districts—King Philippe of
Spain in Farinelli and the King.

The play opens
with King Philippe of Spain sitting up in his bed talking to a goldfish
swimming around in its bowl trying to avoid the hook at the end of the King’s
little fishing pole:

I was touched by the confidence with which you speak to me
of your affairs; the cordiality of your offer to redress mine; the tender
anxiety for my health—but I should tell you in the strictest confidence you
understand…shh…here the body cares very little for the affairs of the mind. (Act
1, Scene 1)

As the King’s
mental illness progresses from this point and becomes a concern of his court,
his wife, Queen Isabella is sent away so that the King cannot physically harm
her as he had before. But, what’s to be done for him? It’s the year 1737. While
attending an opera in London, the Queen thinks she may have discovered just
what the King needs—the renowned castrato Farinelli:

Then…he began. A long note, held; I must think it was
beyond a minute. A swooping, soaring sound and the notes were above the
tree-tops, bird-like, unimaginable. When the aria finished just now I couldn’t
help my tears; I was unable to move; I just stared at the stage, where he had
been…I couldn’t believe what I had seen and heard…I felt something had profoundly
changed within me. …and then, —I knew…That I must hope somehow to bring
Farinelli to Spain with me. (Act 1, Scene 3)

The Queen
finds a way to bring Farinelli back to Spain, and Farinelli begins to sooth the
mad King with his voice from the heavens. The King becomes calmer yet when he
moves with the Queen and Farinelli to a house in the forest, where he cuts a
hole in the trees so he can hear the “hidden notes” of the spheres above. The
King tells Farinelli, “you must sing to me; in the long hours of dark, when my
mind is screaming in the silence, then that is when I need you to sing to me.” (Act
2, Scene 5)

The Queen was
sure Farinelli’s singing was effective:

And they say it was Farinelli that helped to restore the
health of the King of Spain—just by hearing this wonderful singing voice the
King rose out of his depression and wanted to live again! It was the only thing
the King could bear in the end. The sound of Farinelli’s voice. (Act
2, Scene 5)

In Farinelli’s
own and immodest assessment: “He is decidedly better because of me, and in his
lonely life I have become a song he now depends on.” (Act 2, Scene 1) And, in
making his clinical assessment, the King’s doctor was “of the opinion that the
King’s illness has turned." (Act 1, Scene 4)

The utopian existence
comes to an end when the King is called back to Madrid to take on an impending
English invasion. He would not be seen again.

This fanciful
tale is not so fanciful; it’s drawn from the historical King Philippe of Spain.
His grandfather, King Louis XIV of France placed him there, and there he
reigned for almost 50 years. Indeed he was mad, and indeed his wife the Queen
brought the renowned castrato Farinelli back to Spain where he served the King
for 9 years and then the son who succeeded him until this son’s death. From
there Farinelli retired to the Italian countryside instead of returning to the
public stages in Europe.

The current NY production could not replicate Farinelli’s voice exactly now that castrati
are not to be found anymore; however, a countertenor was able to produce a
swooping and soaring sound. Though Farinelli’s voice
could not be replicated perfectly, the staging of the play was replicated as
the audience of the day would have seen it in the mid 1700s. The lighting was
supplied by candlelight from chandeliers and sconces that were part of the sets.
The musicians supporting Farinelli’s performances were also situated on the
stage with him. And, as the theaters were arranged then, seats for the audience
were available on both sides of the stage.